To start, Zendesk engineering leader Adrian gave a good description of the growth, scalability and infrastructure issues faced by Zendesk engineering. Gautum talked about hiring engineers, from tricky questions he throws out to interviewees, to looking for the right fit.

Zendesk engineers Rose and Ana talked about transitioning into engineering from non-engineering backgrounds. It’s always refreshing to hear from both experienced software engineering professionals who have done it for a decade, and from relative newcomers to software engineering. Zendesk engineer Ana Martinez arrived a little later to share some advice to the students.

The students listened as the Zendesk engineers talked about the value of networking, whiteboarding fearlessly in interviews and staying motivated to learn new things every day. Students asked questions about mentorship programs within the company, and the engineering team structure at Zendesk (ie. how do product managers work with software engineers, how big is a team). One student asked about how to become an infrastructure engineer, to which she was recommended to simply shoot for software engineering roles and then move into infrastructure from there.

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